


come all ye disciples

by thisisthefamilybusiness



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Crisis of Faith, Gen, Philosophy, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-28
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-29 18:34:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6388078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisisthefamilybusiness/pseuds/thisisthefamilybusiness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perhaps some would say Hannibal had a ‘god complex’, but that is false. <br/>No, Hannibal does not think of himself as a god.<br/>He simply knows the truth.<br/>*<br/>Will didn’t care quite so much about his own place in the universe’s design, didn’t even care about Hell or salvation or prayers or church. He just wanted to think that there was peace, peace at last, for all the innocent dead he saw.</p>
            </blockquote>





	come all ye disciples

**Author's Note:**

> Short flash fic I wrote exploring faith in the Hannibal universe for both Hannibal and Will. That's it.

_God, mistake of man, or man, mistake of God?_

_Friedrich Nietzsche_

Friedrich Nietzsche said: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

Hannibal was always rather taken with Nietzsche and his disciple Knut Hamsun, especially as a younger man, when he first began to collect collapsed churches and ruined temples, tallying up the body counts of all the life the supposed Lord of Creation destroyed, trying to find rationality behind his dead sister’s cold brown eyes and bitter winter ice that he could still feel eating at his bones.

Perhaps some would say Hannibal had a ‘god complex’, but that is false. Hannibal does not believe in the pleasant little stories of gods that people tell each other to cleanse themselves of guilt for the ways they ruin each other. Hannibal does not need a man on a cross to take his sins for him. Unlike the common human swine, he is perfectly comfortable with his so-called sins, every single one of them. Others hope that a magical force will descend to rearrange the universe in their favour when they want something: Hannibal does not bother wheedling with silent higher powers and simply takes what he wants.

No, Hannibal does not think of himself as a god.

He simply knows the truth.

Nietzsche made a proposal on suicide and free will: If there is a God, and this God does have a plan for the universe, and a man decides to take his own life, then there are only two possible philosophical options.

Either the man is fulfilling the desires of God, who must have wanted him to commit suicide—in direct violation of the concept of free will and all religious scriptures that forbade suicide—or the man is God—for if any human can overthrow God’s plan, then God is not all-powerful after all, and it is humanity who ultimately kills their own Divine Creator simply by existing, and God is dead, the world left to spin on as an absurd place where innocent little girls get taken away from their brothers by men with desperation in their eyes in the cold of Soviet winter.

Hannibal opens his eyes and smiles faintly at Dr. Du Maurier.

“I know what will happen when I die.”

_And I do not fear it._

* * *

 

_Lieth down, riseth not, till the heavens be no more._

_Job 14:12_

The only memory he really has of his mother is of going to church with her one summer morning, sitting on a hard pine pew as organ music played and they read Bible passages, the warm cinnamon smell of her perfume on her sky-blue sundress. She was a Lutheran, like his father, but his father wasn’t really religious and never went to church, and after she left, Will stopped going to church too.

Even after he was old enough to take himself to church, Will didn’t go.

He supposes he could have—maybe that he even should have, like it might have softened the blows of his hard-luck life—but he didn’t.

All Will really knew was that he believed in Heaven, some place better for every person he had been too late to save. He _had_ to believe that there was a Heaven, if he wanted to sleep at night.

Will didn’t care quite so much about his own place in the universe’s design, didn’t even care about Hell or salvation or prayers or church. He just wanted to think that there was peace, peace at last, for all the innocent dead he saw. Even if that afterlife was simply just quiet, restful blackness, where weary bones got sleep without being haunted by nightmares, it would be good enough for him.


End file.
